So, here’s the thing. I hear people say they’re not interested in voting for anyone that running, so why vote?

Because if you’re not voting, you’re never gonna get the candidates you want. This is the long game. A smart politician, the sort of person you’d actually want to be in office, isn’t going to come out appeal to you unless they KNOW you’re gonna vote. Why would they waste their time? If it’s so easy to convince you to stay home, and they can’t rely on you, they can’t waste their time. They’ve got tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of other people who WILL vote to cater to. Why should they listen to you because if they did listen, maybe, just maybe, you might vote?

Think about this way. Think about if you did have a candidate that you liked that pretty much said and did what you wanted them to say. This person holds office for a few election cycles, and you REALLY LIKE them, so you keep voting for them.

Then, they turn around, and start courting the vote of some group that wants different stuff than you, and that group never voted. They just said “well, if you do this for us, THEN we’ll vote for you”. How would you feel? Would you still vote for them? Or would you feel betrayed enough to go vote for someone else? Or even just stay home?

My point is: voting isn’t about this year or this election. It’s about building trust with the people who run your government. They can’t listen to you if you don’t vote, they can’t listen if they can’t trust you to vote, every time. So FIRST you vote, THEN you tell them you’re unhappy, THEN you vote in the primaries and get them out.

But just complaining that they don’t care about the things you care about when they can’t trust you to vote? That’s just dysfunctional.

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Starving to death after having been kept alive for a decade while your husband and your parents fight over whether or not to keep your useless body alive long after it doesn’t work on it’s own and your brain is mush, and having been exploited by every fucking news broadcast in the world. Not to mention having soulless politicians use you as pawn to gain votes from stupid fundamentalists.— Phat Phree – Top 50 Worst Ways to Die (#6)